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Freedom Fighters:
The Violent Pursuit of Existential Freedom
in
Selected 20th Century American Narratives
by
Helen Frances Patey A thesis submitted
to the
School of Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of English Language and Literature Memorial University ofNewfoundland
September 2008
St. John's Newfoundland
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AUG 0 ? 2010
Abstract
This project undertakes a study of the representations of violence in a number of twentieth century American narratives. Traditional approaches to violence, both real and fictitious, frequently focus on causal analysis in an attempt to divide the violent from the non-violent. Such analysis precludes the shared human experiences that form the basis of existential philosophy.
Approaching violent narratives from the perspective of philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, my study considers certain acts ofviolence as originating from a distorted search for freedom and autonomy.
"Freedom Fighters" is divided into five chapters, four of which focus on a
series of texts from different eras, different authors, and different social settings.
Their commonalities result from the characters' use of violence, in one form or another, to attempt to give a sense of meaning and freedom to their human existence. In so doing, they confront a diversity of social circumstances, sometimes successfully, and sometimes not so successfully. Chapter One
introduces the basic theories of violence and explores the philosophical concepts of existentialism that illuminate such theories. Part One includes Chapters Two and Three; it reflects on the desperation produced by the need to escape from threats to freedom. Chapter Two considers the fear provoked by racial
intimidation as particularized in slavery; it explores texts by William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison. The first three authors have particular significance to this work because of their own affinity for the
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philosophical writings of Sartre. Chapter Three in Part One deals with the responses to a new form of slavery, perhaps as pernicious as the old: that of corporate capitalist domination. Part Two, which includes Chapters Four and Five, deals with the freedom to become self-realized--to individuate. Chapter Four explores the movement towards individuation in novels by E.L. Doctorow and Walker Percy. In Chapter Five, the issues surrounding the struggle for subjective freedom in the face of gender dynamics are analyzed. The thesis concludes with a further consideration of the implications ofSartre's philosophy for a more complete and constructive understanding of violent behaviour.
"Freedom Fighters" offers a new critical approach to the understanding of
violence in texts, and subsequently perhaps in reality. Introducing the ideas of Sartre into such analysis opens up a new field of inquiry that will, one hopes, lead to innovative critical approaches. Reading the philosophy of existentialism with a more affirmative gaze offers the potential to shed new light on traditional concepts of individualism, freedom, and violent action.
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Acknowledgements
First, I wish to thank the English Department of Memorial University for the Fellowship which allowed me to begin my studies. My appreciation is also due to the University for granting me the A. G. Hatcher Award for Academic Excellence.
I want to thank my children, Liam and Ariana, for their patience and support during this long journey. The sacrifices were theirs as well as mine.
Thanks must also be extended to family and friends who offered help of various kinds, as required. To my friend and colleague, Carol Goodman, I wish to acknowledge the significance of our regular meetings in easing the strain of juggling family and work commitments, as well as in offering intellectual
stimulation.
Finally, without the continuous belief in me that Dr. Bernice Schrank has always shown, I would never have accomplished this work. Her own scholarship and integrity are an inspiration to all her students, and her support has been
invaluable to me.
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Table of Contents
Abstract n
Acknowledgements tv
Introduction 1
Chapter One: The Existential Discourse of Violence and Freedom 8
Part One: Freedom from
Chapter Two: Dying to be Free: Escaping Racial Oppression 29 in the works ofFaulkner, Wright, Ellison and Morrison
Chapter Three: Corporate Raiders: Confronting the Violence 76 of Consumer Capitalism in Wolfe and Ellis
Part Two: Freedom to
Chapter Four: On the Road to the Self: Slouching Towards 115 I
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Freedom in the works of Doctorow and Percy
Chapter Five: En-Gendering Violence: Pitfalls on Freedom 162 Road in Allison and Palahniuk
Conclusion 190
Introduction
Existentialism and Violence in Literature
The artwork presents itself to me as an absolute end, a demand, an appeal. It addresses itself to my pure freedom and in this way reveals to me the pure freedom oftheOther.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The subject of art has been extended from psychology to the human condition.
Albert Camus
Sartre asserts that literature is an excellent method of comprehending his philosophy of existentialism. Efforts to establish an existential psychoanalysis are particularized in his biography of Gustave Flaubert, The Family Idiot.
Sartre's plays, such as The Flies and No Exit, offer further realizations of his unique form of humanistic analysis. Hazel E. Barnes, the American professor who initially brought Sartre's philosophy to the English world with her translation of Being and Nothingness, explores his theories in Humanistic Existentialism: The Literature of Possibility. Few philosophic concepts more
singularly both refer to, and lend themselves to interpretation of, literary narratives.
One aspect ofSartre's conceptual analysis that has received little attention is his concern with violence. Of late, studies by philosophers Tony Stigliano and Ronald E. Santoni attempt to rectify this lack. It is with this concern in mind that the following study was written. "Freedom Fighters" is grounded in Sartre's
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opus, Being and Nothingness, wherein he devotes a short section to the violence in William Faulkner's Light in August. Sartre's text is devoted to ontological considerations of individuals and their relationships. As he discusses Faulkner, the philosopher elucidates a connection between the individual's desire for freedom and the potential to resort to violent behavior against the Other who is perceived as a threat. From this page or two of Sartrean analysis grew the present literary approach. It offers a fresh perspective on American culture, literature, and the violence inherent in both.
The obsession with violence in American culture has been well documented by such critics as Patrick Shaw, Michael Kowalewski, Kathryn Hume, and James Richard Giles. Society's increasing concern with violence is reflected in contemporary American literature, providing an imaginative
resource for authors. Literary criticism, in turn, has become engaged in a search for terms to describe and deconstruct these violent narratives in ways that seem to parallel "the activity in which American authors themselves have been personally engaged" (Kowalewski I 00). "Freedom Fighters" seeks to enter the critical discourse with a theory that speaks to the connection between violent and
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liberating desires. Grounded in philosophic existentialism, this study considers aspects of violence that reflect the ongoing search for individual identity and freedom, a search that navigates between conflicting considerations of race, gender, and social identity. My thesis argues that such narratives enable
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resolutions to emerge that reveal, and sometimes even dissolve, the gap between the victimizer and the victim's conflicting demands for individual freedom.
I depart from previous perspectives in significant ways. Although
existential treatments of literature are not new, critical focus has often been on nihmsm, angst, and alienation. My focus explores the positive aspects of a
philosophy that emphasizes individual responsibility and chosen action as escape from alienation. My work sees the novel not as a mere presentation of an
existential problem, but rather as the initial first step in framing a solution. To see "into violence", argues Tanner, "is a form of resistance when what is exposed before the reader/viewer is the dynamics ofviolation ... the power dynamics upon which the violator's force depends" (Tanner 104). Along with critic James Giles and others, I reject critical positions that "cannot serve the purpose of assuming an ethical function for literature as well as recognition of the political realities ofthe cultures in which individual works of literature are written" (Giles 113). French existentialism, as propounded by Jean Paul Sartre and others, takes a strong ethical position that always attempts to consider the political milieu of the individual. Nevertheless, I do not attempt to deal with large scale social violence in this thesis, but I maintain focus on individual violent responses.
Critical studies of violence in American literature begin with Frohock's study, The Novel of Violence, in the 1950s. He considers the work of early 20th century novelists, such as Dos Passos, Hemingway, and Faulkner. Since that
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time, various literary critics have turned their attention in that direction and most at least mention William Faulkner. None, though, explore Faulkner's narratives of violence as illuminated in Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness. Sartre's analysis challenges us to critically consider the nature of power, both individual and collective. In fact, such considerations are essential to a meaningful,
authentic human existence. Failure to accept the individual and social
responsibility outlined by existentialism results, according to Tony Stigliano, in
"the loss of authorship over one's actions [that] may well be so threatening to one's sense of being the author of one's life that only an extreme action can overcome one's being objectified in and by one's situation" (60). Certain novelists, such as E.L. Doctorow, explore in their writings ways to reassume such authorship and establish authentic realizations of freedom without the need for violent action.
Not all novels of violence result in such redemption. In American Psycho Bret Easton Ellis brutally presents a contemporary man for whom money and commodities are the essence of life. His main character's attempts to narrate himself are fragmented; one might say of this serial killer that he "attempts to glue together his fragmented self with blood" (Gomel 60). Ellis draws a picture of an "everyman" who is essentially "no-man" in a world where all subjects are interchangeable and equally objectified. If post-modernism offers no unified self as subject, American Psycho reveals the nightmarish quality of such a world.
This postmodern moment is devoid of a humanizing moment; its center is a void.
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Beginning with Sartre's treatment of Faulkner, my thesis originally
focuses upon an exploratory narrative style that seeks to escape the limitations of time and space, subject and object, victim and victimizer. Writing in the shadow cast by Faulkner, Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright articulate a black man's perspective on the struggle for recognition, freedom and visibility. Toni Morrison's Beloved enters this discourse with a presentation of the
power/exclusion dialectic wherein sexual sadism is utilized by power figures to attempt the complete appropriation of the Other's freedom. Morrison directs her narrative gaze on a revisioning of the past that allows future possibilities to open up for her characters. As horrifying as the events in the text are, the main
character lives to become free and to move freely, if painfully, in the direction of self-realization. The novels studied here show the gradual emergence of the
black subject, from the relatively impersonal early slave narratives to Morrison's Sethe, who chooses death for her baby rather than slavery.
Narratives such as Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club and Dorthy Allison's Bastard out Of Carolina demonstrate the challenges to freedom that can result from socially restrictive gender prescriptions. Such subjects, although
superficially free, are not at liberty to realize their subjectivity in ways that are socially acceptable. In contemporary Western culture there are various
impediments to self-realization. Critical theorists such as Mark Currie and Elana Gomel define subjectivity as primarily a narrative construct: "the only way to explain who we are, is to tell our own story [ ... ] we learn how to self-narrate
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from the outside, from other stories" (Currie qtd. in Gomel xv). Characters in Allison, Palahniuk, Doctorow, and Percy have much insight to offer concerning the road to subjective freedom and the violence that can accompany it.
All of the texts chosen for this study shed some light on Sartre's concepts of freedom and violence. Hazel E. Barnes clearly expresses the significance of such an original perspective:
For almost a century now, prevailing psychologists and the literature written under their influence have agreed that men cherish the illusion of freedom while in fact being determined by heredity, by environment, and by early childhood experiences. Humanistic existentialism challenges this doctrine and claims that exactly the reverse is true: every man is free, but most men, fearing the consequences and the responsibilities of freedom, refuse to acknowledge its presence in themselves and would deny it to others. [ ... ] The literature which shows that men are free presents to the world a new philosophy of man. (Barnes 3)
Such a philosophy requires a shift in perspective, a new appraisal of the human situation. The novels explored below reveal the consequences of evading and of embracing one's individual freedom of choice. Man is more than his history and more than his biology. As in the myth of Eden, man's self-consciousness begins with an act of choice. Some choices come with serious consequences, such as expulsion from the Garden. Death at one's own hands is a rational choice in certain circumstances acknowledged by Sartre, Camus and other existentialists.
Whatever the choice, one is free to make it, if one is prepared to accept the consequences. This is the understanding implied in Sartre's well know phrase,
"dreadful freedom." "Freedom Fighters" researches the relationship of concepts of freedom and violence with narratologies of the self.
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The novels, philosophic works, and literary criticism that I have chosen to approach in this work are limited, of course, by necessity. Selected texts treat individuals as ontologically free, and confront the issues that result from that basic grounding. Violence, as one possible exercise of that freedom, is explored to ascertain its success or failure as an existential mode of being. In later works, such as Notebooks for Ethics, Sartre considers counterviolence as a justified social response to restraints such as colonization, but this is not the focus of Being and Nothingness, or of "Freedom Fighters."
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Chapter One
The Discourse of Violence and Freedom:
"Raiding the Inarticulate"
[T]he ominous escalation of violence on both the interpersonal and the global level represents one of the central social and political challenges for the dawning twenty-frrst century.
Violence and Its Alternatives
1.1 Putting Violence to Words
Violence in America has increasingly been the subject of critics and novelists during the advance of the twentieth century. In fact, says Patrick Shaw, "Violence is at the heart of the American culture" ( 1 08). 1 Haunted by the ghosts of slavery, civil unrest and major wars, America finds itself hostage to terror both at home and abroad. American literature has come to reflect society's increasing concern as authors seem, almost
obsessively, to tum violence into an imaginative resource. Literary criticism finds itself engaged in a search for terms to describe and deconstruct these violent narratives in ways that seem to parallel ''the activity in which American authors themselves have been personally engaged" (Kowalewski 1 00). Grounded in philosophic existentialism, this study considers aspects of violence that reflect the ongoing human search for individual identity and freedom, a search that spans considerations of race, gender, and social identity. My thesis argues that such narratives enable resolutions to emerge that reveal,
1An important resource for this study is Patrick Shaw's The Modern Novel of Violence in America. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston Pub, 2000. Also significant is the ground breaking work ofW.M. Frohock in The Novel of Violence in America. Boston: Beacon P,
1950.
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and sometimes even dissolve the gap between the victimizer and the victim's conflicting demands for individual freedom.
There are numerous definitions of violence offered by theorists; many agree that the violent act is an evil act, albeit sometimes a necessary evil, to be avoided if possible.
As Arendt states, "Violence can be justifiable, but it will never be legitimate" (Arendt 9).
In her accessible account of the narrative construction of the violent subject,
Bloodscripts: Writing the Violent Subject, Elana Gomel offers some interesting and controversial insights. The act of murder, she claims, shatters the integrity of the self because the perpetrator is caught in the dichotomy of both acknowledging and denying the humanity of the victim. This vacillation, this inevitable splitting of the perpetrator's self-hood in the act of violence, is how Gomel accounts for the shattering impact of killing on the coherence of the self. This shattering of the self is seen in texts that will be discussed below, such as American Psycho and Fight Club. This shattering, says Gomel, is mistaken by the narrativized self as liberation from the "prison house of language".
Violence, argues Gomel, appears as a communion with the Real that seems to carry one beyond the shifting illusions of the Symbolic. Gomel asserts that this 'communion' is he
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I greatest illusion of all (198).Certain ofGomel's concepts in Bloodscripts are comparable with conclusions arrived at in this thesis, although she mentions neither existentialism nor Sartre. The perspective which I assume here defmes the dichotomy of the violator as one vacillating between the attempt to obliterate the freedom of the Other, while simultaneously coming to the realization that he needs this freedom to acknowledge his power. For Gomel, the
motivating force of violent action is what she terms the "violent sublime"; for Sartre, the motivation of the violent subject is to reduce or eliminate the threat to his own freedom that the Other presents. Nevertheless, Gomel recognizes violence as one aspect of freedom: "The desire for violence is part of human freedom and thus it can never be eliminated, only confronted" (Gomel205). Once violence is acknowledged as one
possibility of action, it must also be accepted as a possibility of language and therefore of narrative. Arguing against the position that violence is some form of contagion, with representations of violence serving as ''vectors of transmission," Gomel asserts that we must accept violence as embedded in the subject and therefore rooted also in narratives of subject construction. She perceives the desire to inflict pain as grounded in the
individual's need to transcend the limitations of his own embodied self. This bears a relation to my own thesis, which argues that the violent act is based on the need to defend one's freedom in the face of a threat perceived from the Other. I agree with Gomel's conclusion that violence "delivers nothing but what is available to every human being anyway: mortality" (208). I discuss this argument in detail as I explore Sartre's
explication of Faulkner in Chapter 2 of this wor~ ''Dying to be Free".
Although much of my research revolves around physical violence, there is another I
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manifestation of violence that informs my study. In his article entitled "Cultural Violence" Johan Galtung offers this definition: "By 'cultural violence' we mean those aspects of culture, the symbolic sphere of our existence [ ... ] that can be used to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence" (Galtung 40). Any study of violence, says
Galtung, must consider both the use of violence and the justification of that use. Direct or
structural violence he defmes as "avoidable insults to basic human needs" ( 40) which are listed in this article as four: 1) survival, 2) well-being, 3) identity, and 4) freedom. This type of violence has "exploitation as its center piece," with some members of the structure (the top-dogs) getting more from the interactions than the others (underdogs) (Gal tung 42). Two of those basic needs with which this work concerns itself primarily are the needs of meaning -the deprivation of which produces alienation - and freedom needs -the deprivation of which produces repression and resulting violence. Galtung includes a notion of "cultural violence" which he defmes as "any aspect of a
culture that can be used to legitimize violence in its direct or structural form" (Violence and Its Alternatives xvi). The ultimate violent structure, says Galtung, has exploitation at
its center, with those at the top getting much more from the exchange than those at the bottom: "A violent structure leaves marks not only on the human body but also on the human spirit" (Galtung 42). In the vicious cycle that he describes: ''the culture preaches, teaches, admonishes, eggs-on, and dulls us into seeing exploitation and/or repression as normal and natural, or into not seeing them (particularly not exploitation) at all. Then come the eruptions, the effort to use direct violence to get out of the structural iron-cage, and counter-violence to keep the cage intact" ( 43). Exploitation results in repression, which is essentially the deprivation of freedom. One potential response to this deprivation is direct violence. With this conclusion, Galtung's argument is aligned with my own as well as those presented by Tony Stigliano in "Jean Paul Sartre: On Understanding Violence."
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When we speak of the need for liberation we generally consider the liberation of the working classes, the downtrodden, and the poor underclass. There is, however, in the western world of our time, the need to be liberated from "a relatively well-functioning, rich, powerful society" (Marcuse 264). Such a society, taking the U.S. as the model, is characterized by the "apparently inseparable unity ... of productivity and destruction, of satisfaction of needs and repression, of liberty within a system of servitude" (Marcuse 268). Such servitude in the face ofthe possibilities of freedom, says Herbert Marcuse,
"activates and intensifies in this society a primary aggressiveness to a degree, I think, hitherto unknown in history" (268). The need for change is suppressed, both by the apparent satisfaction of superficial, created needs, and by the 'liberating' scientific knowledge of psychology and psychiatry. Dissatisfaction is treated with therapy or Prozac. What is there to complain about when living in the best, the freest society in the world? There can be no improvement in our system, according to Marxist critic Fredric Jameson, until we develop "a self-punishing enumeration of all the blocks that make the reimagining of utopia today a difficult, if not to say a well-nigh impossible task" (111). If we are to explore these blocks, and if we are to perceive violence as emerging from
threats to freedom, it is necessary to explore the concept of violence and thus the concept of freedom itself.
1.2 Sartre and Violence
I recognize that violence under whatever form it may manifest 12
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itself is a setback. But it is an inevitable setback because we are in a universe of violence; and if it is true that recourse to violence risks perpetuating it, it is also true that it is the only means of bringing an end to it.
Jean-Paul Sartre
At the center of this reality [industrial societies] is conflict and violence, not merely as a social contingency in times of economic upheaval, but necessary to the attempt to preserve subjectivity, to prevent the formation of unknowing, thing-like, working but inert
"persons" who would be nothing more than proletarian and bourgeois: nothing human.
Tony Stigliano
We live in violent times, yet I suppose this might be said of any age. For Americans, it is certainly true that the infamous events of what is termed 9111 have manifested that nation's vulnerability to unimaginable violence. Awareness of that vulnerability has been intensified by the rise of random school shootings across North America, along with an increase in serial killings. Taken together, these events threaten the individual's sense of safety. In such circumstances it would appear more than ever before that the world needs to come to terms with the philosophical issues surrounding violent action. How is such action to be understood and can it ever be justified? "Is it e er morally defensible, in an unjust world shamefully divided between the privileged and the 'least favored,' to employ violent means in order to rectify injustice and create what some have called a 'new humanity' and more humane world?" (Santoni x). These complex issues demand attention; unlike many current thinkers, Sartre has been consistently engaged with these issues. They are pervasive motifs in all of his work, both literary and
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philosophic. This dissertation addresses, in some small way, my interpretation of Jean- Paul Sartre's dialectic of freedom: a dialectic which sheds light on the issue of violence. I confine myself to fiction that expresses existential concepts of freedom, wedded to
violent imagery. I do not attempt to deal with the larger political issues that concerned the great French thinker, issues that surround WW II, the Algerian war of independence, or his changing views on Marxism. As Sartre himself believed, it is essential to
understand human existence from the individual perspective before addressing the collective. The individual subject is a necessary moment, as Hegel would argue, in the comprehension of humanity at the sociopolitical stage. Literary texts generally approach their themes from the position of the individual subject.
The tendency of our time to reduce theories of violence to empirical theories of causality is anathema to the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. His perspective, on a social level, is more in line with Foucault's analysis of power in Discipline and Punish. They both perceive that the control of asocial behaviour is one way in which the dominating powers manipulate their underlings in order to achieve predictable results. Today's methods may be less blatantly cruel than torture, but the prison system, chemical castration, behaviour modification, etc. can be violent to the spirit. In his article, "Jean- Paul Sartre on Understanding Violence," philosopher and critical theorist Tony Stigliano explains:
For a philosopher like Sartre, causal analysis precludes the idea that social reality is constituted by "sensuous human activity", by shared practices of work, understanding and discourse. If violence is
"explained" by gene structures, we remove from our analysis the person, his/her habits and culturally received practices to the point
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where self-expression and self-affmnation are reduced to a
manipulable etiology. Hence, we no longer would be concerned with the way a person "makes" the world he/she inhabits, and we are caught up in the fruitless search for the variable dividing the pacific from the violent. (52)
Sartre' s social theory is, of course, primarily informed by the work of Marx. His much publicized disillusionment with the Communist Party, one shared with writers Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, had more to do with the political policies ofthe USSR than with the philosophy of Karl Marx, and Marxist socioeconomic theory always informed his ideology. For Sartre, individual actions are generated from a demand for meaning, grounded by the need to survive in the face of artificially generated scarcity. Sartre was in sympathy with the rights of the colonized to violently seize their freedom from the
colonialist; this constituted his famous feud with his old friend Albert Camus. "Freedom Fighters" does not attempt to address the political forms of violence, except indirectly.
My primary concern is with acts of violence perpetrated on or by the individual. Although resulting from individual choice, violence can be viewed as "a distorted way people seek meaning and autonomy in their lives" (Stigliano 52). Since man exists as freedom in the existential sense, therefore all perceived threats to freedom are interpreted as threats to that same self.2
One's choices are based upon, or are related to, the concept of self which the individual holds. Such self-concepts, in turn, are rooted in race, class, gender, etc. To understand violence one needs to attempt to comprehend the ideologies that inform these
2 For ease of reading and translating from Sartre, I use the masculine noun "man"
and the masculine pronoun "he" to refer, in a general way, to persons or beings.
relevant categories. No being is ever simply an individual, according to Sartre, but is
"universalized by his period." Stigliano offers this analysis of Sartre:
In Sartre the terror and boredom of modernity is clearer than in the work of the more conventional scientist. The criminal is seeking ways of breaking free, thus his situation holds, in an ironic twist, the "secret"
of a way out for society as a whole. The criminal forces upon us the question of the nature of liberation. (53)
Sartre's own forays into fiction, as well as his interest in other writers, indicates that the narrative is an excellent method of comprehending an individual in life process.
To begin to understand violent action, or indeed any existentialist action, one must start with the dialectics that make up Sartre's ontology-self/other, materiaVpraxis, etc.
Moving outwards from the conscious self, termed by Sartre being-for-itself, we encounter the Other, whom we perceive as a threat to our sense of self, and to our individual
freedom to defme ourselves as we wish. The material world presents us with another threat, against which we attempt to assert ourselves through our actions. We overcome this threat "only to discover the lack, the threat again ... [since] material reality and the relationships arising from that reality shape the different ways need is limited ... "
(Stigliano 58). All subjects confront these outside forces; the response of each is, of course, unique. The violent individual has the same self-actualizing needs as everyone else and may give the appearance of being conventional, such as I will later argue is the case with the narrator of Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho. However, "the loss of authorship over one's actions may well be so threatening to one's sense of being the author of one's life [which surely is freedom] that only an extreme action can overcome one's being objectified in and by one's situation" (Stigliano 60). A subject or group who
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feels stripped of their subject-hood may act in such a way as to objectify an Other. In fact, Stigliano maintains that there are only two possible ways to overcome the scarcity in the world that confronts us: one is class struggle and the other is individualist violence. While I disagree that Sartre's philosophy is this nihilistic, Stigliano's position certainly accounts for the increasing violence in our post-modern world. The latter philosopher views the violent criminal as analogous to an 'acting-out' child; he/she acts out the anger and frustration that is passively experienced by the rest of us. This theory implicates all ofus in the violent behaviour to which society then becomes victim. Such a sense of
implication is frequently considered in reader-response theories to violent narratives.
Sartre's position, as translated from his Notebooks by Ronald E. Santoni, is clearly expressed when he argues that there "are no witnesses to violence, only participants"
(59).
Philosopher and Sartre scholar Ronald E. Santoni has written extensively on Jean- Paul Sartre's complex perspective on violence.3 He summarizes the philosopher's
ideology thusly: "Violence is 'pure exercise of freedom' appropriating either the world or human being by destruction" (Sartre cited in Santoni 23). Sartre's first great philosophic treatise, Being and Nothingness, owes much to the German idealist G.W.F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel's famous dialectic of the Master-Slave relationship had profoundly influenced Karl Marx. Sartre invokes this analysis in his own account of
3 See Sartre on Violence: Curiously Ambivalent for an in-depth study of the evolution of Sartre's ideology on violence in all of his philosophic works. Santoni deals with hitherto unanalyzed material, such as Sartre's later lectures, as he explores Sartre's search for a philosophy grounded in the ontological and social freedom of humanity.
relations between the self and Others. In Hegel's account, one becomes truly human only when one is prepared to risk everything: it is "only through the risk of life that freedom comes to light" (cited in Santoni 8). The Hegelian struggle does not end in death, but rather in the subservience of one to the Other; each begins by demanding self-recognition by the Other. The resolution of the conflict results in one who is prepared to risk life becoming the Master, while he who is prepared to submit becomes the slave; he has chosen "dependent consciousness" rather than "autonomous consciousness." This is only what Hegel calls the first "moment" in the dialectic. In the next "moment," the Slave is revealed as the only one of the two who is ready for transformation or change from his present situation. The Master is fixed in his position and cannot accept another Master:
The slave is the secret of change in history and his desire for freedom from oppression is the ground of man's becoming more human. [ ... ] In "overcoming" his Master as Master, the Slave "overcomes" himself as Slave and reveals reality; in surpassing Slavery, he achieves
satisfaction, authentic freedom, and self-transformation. So ifHistory is, as Hegel claims, a "dialectic between Mastery and Slavery", then this "overcoming" by the Slave starts a new "period" in History in which the postfight domination of the Slave by the Master is replaced by the Slave's "determination" of human existence. (Santoni 9)
Human existence will not be satisfied until the resolution of this dialectic; when and how this transformation will occur becomes the issue for those, like Sartre, Marx and others who were influenced by this Hegelian analysis.
This dialectic informs Sartre's account of intersubjectivity and the difficulty of establishing authentic human relationships as given in Being and Nothingness and later in The Critique of Dialectical Reason. Husserl's phenomenology, along with Hegel's
influences the premise on which the "self' is established. Phenomenology points to two
divergent beings, for which Sartre uses the Hegelian terms-"being-for-itself' (l'etre- pour-soi) and "being-in-itself' (1' etre-en-soi).
Being-in-itselfis "object" being or thing being: it is what it is, has
"identity," is not conscious, cannot refer to itself, has no possibilities or projects (human reality has projects for it), coincides with itself, is one with itself. In radical contrast to being-in-itself, being-for-itself is conscious, self-aware, self-referential being. As distinctive human reality, being-for-itself is not what it is and is what it is not. It is not a
"what" or object or thing. ( ... ]in a word, being-for-itself, or human reality, is freedom. (Santoni 11)
This being-for-itself, this conscious subject encounters the Other in his "look" or "gaze."
This gaze reveals the subject as now an object: as an "in-itself' for the Other and for the world. Desiring a world wherein he is no longer controlled or defined by the "gaze of the Other," the violent individual considers that he has the right to destroy the Other in order to achieve that goal. Of course, violence is an alienating enterprise, doomed to fail in its purpose. It is an act which Sartre terms "mauvaise foi," or bad faith; it dehumanizes the perpetrator as it dehumanizes the victim. Such violence, in Santoni's view, destroys Sartre's system of rules for being authentically human (28). In his famous lecture
"Existentialism is a Humanism," since published as Existentialism and Humanism, Sartre responds to those who have misinterpreted his doctrines. Of human relationships he explains the following:
Thus the man who discovers himself directly in the cogito also discovers all the others, and discovers them as the condition of his own existence. He recognizes that he cannot be anything (in the sense in which one says one is spiritual, or that one is wicked or jealous) unless others recognize him as such. I cannot obtain any
truth whatsoever about myself, except through the mediation of another. The other is indispensable to my existence, and equally so
to any knowledge I can have of myself. Under these conditions, the intimate discovery of myself is at the same time the revelation of the other as a freedom which confronts mine, and which cannot think or will without doing so either for or against me. Thus, at once, we fmd ourselves in a world which is, let us say, that of"inter-subjectivity".
It is in this world that man has to decide what he is and what others are. (Italics mine 45)
We ourselves decide what we will make of what we are "made of." It is through our actions in the world that present us with limitations that we posit ourselves as subjects.
Whether our actions are successful or not, they determine who we are. All human purpose consists of attempts to deal with given limitations in one of these ways: we try to surpass or expand them, or we attempt to deny or accommodate them (Existentialism is a
Humanism 46).4 That is the essence of our existential freedom. "Obviously," Sartre says,
"freedom as the definition of a man does not depend upon others, but as soon as there is a
commitment, I am obliged to will the liberty of others at the same time as my own" (E&H 52). Violent action which is not in the clear defense of one's freedom, and which denies the freedom of the other, is an action of"bad faith." The issue to which we now turn is the concept of freedom itself, as the Western world generally understands it.
1.3 ffistorical Freedom
Dating from the Enlightenment, freedom has emerged as an important concept in the liberal democracies of our Western culture. Theorists for whom freedom was a cultural concern, such as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Stuart Mill used
4 Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism. Trans. Philip Mairet. London:
Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1948. Hereafter cited in text as "E&H."
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freedom and equality as foundational ideas for their theories of human nature. 5 The rise of individualism, as we know it, began with the writings of John Stuart Mill. The
humanism of the Enlightenment led to an emphasis on the human ability to make choices.
Theorists concerned themselves with how such choices would or should be decided upon.
Mill recognized the human right to be independent, acknowledging the rights even of women, a revolutionary perspective in his time. He did, however, distinguish between what an individual wanted and believed would make him happy and what one should want and would truly result in happiness. Mill's Utilitarianism aligned with the Kantian position in one respect: that true freedom follows from allowing the will rather than desire to determine our actions.
1.4 Freedom: Negative and Positive
In the negative sense, freedom is the absence of obstacles to the exercise of choice; it represents the opportunity to act. Positive liberty is concerned with the presence of conditions required to take advantage of freedom - conditions that an
individual cannot create on his/her own. Considering the situation of welfare recipients, one frequently hears the comment that ''No one is preventing them from getting a job."
They may have liberty in the negative sense (or they may not). However, are conditions beneficial to allow them to take advantage of the choices available? Do they have the
5 There are many excellent books that offer detailed histories of freedom in the United States. Such a broad discussion is, of course, outside the scope of this thesis. I refer the reader to one such extensive study by Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 1998.
clothes, the transportation, or the babysitter required to take on a job? Beyond such external conditions, there are often internal barriers to the exercise of choice. There might be fears, addictions, etc. If this hypothetical person on welfare is addicted to alcohol or drugs, are there provisions for help? Has he/she been given the educational, social, and cultural advantages necessary to develop as persons? ''People must exercise their full capacities if they are to be free" (Hirschman 8). By this defmition, few are free.
Freedom includes, and significantly so, the ability to govern or master oneself- an issue recognized by various religions. In a secular society, where advertisers
constantly appeal to our "second order" desires, and there seems no motivation to attain self-control, one might wonder how there can be true freedom. If autonomy, the capacity to govern oneself, is a prerequisite for freedom then the lack of same clarifies a crisis of freedom amidst one of the "freest" societies in the world. Erich Fromm, psychoanalyst, humanist, and freedom researcher, suggests that the Western world confuses the escape from external restraints with the far more complex nature of true freedom. The
"abolition of external domination seemed to be not only a necessary but also a sufficient condition to attain the cherished goal: freedom of the individual" (The Fear of Freedom 2 italics mine). 6 The events of WWII, Fromm argues, have "compelled [us] to recognize that millions in Germany were as eager to surrender their freedom as their fathers were to fight for it; that instead of freedom, they sought for ways to escape from it; that other millions were indifferent and did not believe the defense of freedom to be worth fighting
6 Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956.
Hereafter cited in text as "FF." ' ·
and dying for." (FF 2-3). Fromm's arguments demonstrate affmity with Sartre's own ideology; freedom is both a blessing and a curse. We both seek it and run from it. My study is divided into sections that approach freedom from restraints and freedom to self- realize. Our human nature is often immersed in a dialectic that involves both running towards and running away from our individual freedom. Having largely achieved freedom from restraints in our society, we are free to pursue our individual wants. If only we knew what they were!
We cannot minimize the importance of negative liberty, of individual rights to safety within a social system. The first chapter in Part One establishes the horrors of slavery in America. As Cyrus Patell points out in his text Negative Liberties, there are still many places in the world where a Hobbesian 'state of nature' prevails, where ''the strong prey upon the weak with impunity and without remorse" (186). In refusing to reflect on, or question the nature of the country's freedom, Patell asserts that Americans blind themselves to the dangers inherent in a system that is so entrenched in the psyche that it remains largely unchallenged and unexplored. Dichotomies must be explored;
hypocrisies must be revealed. In the words of Toni Morrison: "living in a nation of people who decided that their world view would combine agendas for individual freedom and mechanisms for devastating racial oppression presents a singular landscape for a writer"
(qouted in Patell 10). These inherent dichotomies in the American national narrative, I will argue, provide fodder for the culture of violence that plagues the country today.
Refusing to recognize threats to individual freedom leaves Americans open to the type of violent perpetrators described by philosopher Tony Stigliano, whose frustration at their
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powerlessness is expressed in violence. This 'emancipated' situation is more pernicious than "the old slavery because one now believes that the new chains represent freedom"
(Stigliano 62). Efforts, such as those of Cyrus Pate II, to deconstruct freedom ideology are significant and enlightening.
In his analysis of the conceptual bedrock of American liberty, Cyrus Patell asserts that "some of the most important philosophizing that is going on within late twentieth- century U.S. culture can be found in works of fiction" (xv). Literature, he maintains with Sartre, brings philosophy to life. Concerning himself with the negative consequences of individualism as it appears in contemporary American thought and fiction, Patell explores the work of Morrison and Pynchon, as they deconstruct the official narratives of freedom and self-reliance: "Philosophers like Emerson, Rawls, and Kateb make compelling cases for the potential of individualism as the basis for an ideal democratic society, but as Pynchon and Morrison so dramatically depict, this potential has yet to be realized in American culture, let alone elsewhere in the world" (xviii). However, neither novels nor critical deconstructionists have made much of an impact on the American love affair with the concept of individualism as an a priori reality.
The American national narrative of individual freedom contains within it various undifferentiated concepts such as those of liberalism and individualism. The latter has become part of the national American identity since·the nineteenth century and is largely attributed to the writings of Emerson. Individualism extols the virtues of non-conformity and self-reliance; the individualist is the 'Adam,' the self-made man who figures so often in American literature. Patell, however, argues that the concept is misunderstood: "from
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the time that the term became part of the American vocabulary in the early part of the nineteenth century, Americans-including Emerson and his followers-have always conceived of individualism as a social formation. Herein lies the genius of the ideology and perhaps the reason for its efficacy: it enforces conformity at the very moment that it extols conformity" (xii). Emersonian liberalism, so popular in U.S. thought, is centered on this false concept of self-reliance. The rugged individualist, the Indiana Jones version, is an example of wish fulfillment. Readers or viewers can fantasize that they are masters of their own fate even as they succumb to the mind-numbing bureaucracy that defmes their lives. Indeed, few persons have any belief in the ability of the average individual to be master of his own fate. Such freedom exists only in popular culture. Even on-screen rugged individualists like Indiana Jones or Batman never seem to deviate from actions which society has determined are in the general best interest. The anti-heroes, the anti- social psychopaths, are the only characters who seem able to act in their own best
interests even when these do not align with those of society. Perhaps this is why we are so fascinated with them.
1.5 Freedom and Existentialism
Many contemporary critics argue for a new conception of philosophic
existentialism. K. Sangari confronts the issue in Ruby Chatterji's frequently referenced collection of essays, Existentialism in America. Previously, says Sangari, the philosophy has been for American critics merely "a handy means for maintaining their own value
systems" (179). It might be better employed, he argues, as "a critical response to the contemporary situation as well as a philosophy which contains the potential for being transformed into an instrument for buttressing that very situation" (179). Central to the existentialist is the concept of man as freedom. Such concerns have long been a major motif of American literature. Freedom is a recurring theme in such texts as Moby Dick, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and in the writings of Thoreau and Emerson.
Existential freedom is also a focus in the works of African American writers such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison. These authors might well be expected ''to respond to certain elements in existentialism, particularly the sense of alienation and protest, by the very nature of [their] social constraints" (Chatterji 13). That same concern can be found in the works of many contemporary American authors, for example, Ellis, Percy, Doctorow, Auster, Ford, and various others. They confront an increasingly threatening world of globalization, urbanization, and bureaucratization in which the individual seems insignificant and manipulated by forces beyond his/her control.
By paradoxically making the ineffectual individual both creator and arbiter of his own values, existentialism allows him to retain the last vestiges of his human dignity through a neo-stoic affirmation of the self in metaphysical revolt. (Chatterji 14)
Many of the novels considered in this thesis are such self-affirming fictions. The
following section, Part One, encompasses the struggle against chains- both the old and the new.
Finally, as we begin to explore French Existentialism in American literature, it behooves us to remember that its gradual emergence into significant critical theory has
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diverse roots. The European climate from which the French movement arose and flourished had little impact on America in the first half of the twentieth century.
Emerging factors, certain of which this study shall address, came to threaten the
individual in American society. No study could even begin to concern itself with all the challenging forces which the individual must battle, either in fiction or in reality.
Multinationals, mass media, home-grown and global terrorism, all have arisen to replace American optimism with European angst. One might argue that these are growing pains, which reveal only that America is growing up. One might assert that a more complex society requires a more complex philosophic system: Sartre replaces Mill. "Freedom Fighters" strives to show that, regardless of the threats to freedom that rock her shores, existentialism can provide a lighthouse to illumine the way home.
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PART I
FREEDOM FROM
Chapter Two: Dying to be Free: Escaping Racial Oppression in the Works ofFaulkner, Wright, Ellison and Morrison
Chapter Three: Corporate Raiders: Violence on Wall Street in the Works of Tom Wolfe and Bret Easton Ellis
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Chapter Two Dying to be Free:
Escaping Racial Oppression
No one can treat a man like a dog without frrst regarding him as a man.
The impossible dehumanization of the oppressed, on the other side of the coin, becomes the alienation of the oppressor. It is the oppressor himselfwho restores, with his slightest gesture, the humanity he seeks to destroy; and, since he denies humanity in others, he regards it everywhere as his enemy. To handle this, [he] must assume the opaque rigidity and imperviousness of stone. In short, he must dehumanize himself, as well.
Jean-Paul Sartre
2.1 Faulkner's Existential Gaze: Black Man as Oppressed Freedom
Nobody has better portrayed the power of the victim's look at his torturers than Faulkner has done in the fmal pages of Light in August.
Jean-Paul Sartre
In his unique study ofthe author's works, Existential-Phenomenological Readings on Faulkner, William J. Sowder remarks that the previous critical approaches have been
too restrictive to deal with the complexity of Faulkner's characters: "Existential
phenomenology can change this. As a philosophy of consciousness it covers the whole human spectrum" (Sowder xiii). It is somewhat surprising, then, that in his analysis of Light in August Sowder fails to consider the brilliant light shed on the main character by
the father of existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, in Being and Nothingness. It was this brief but insightful analysis that started my exploration of the connection between freedom and violence. For whatever the reason, although Sartre is often credited with vaguely defmed
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existential concepts, his work has rarely been given the careful study it requires, even by philosophers. As recently as 2006 David Sherman remarks on this lack in Philosophy Today:
Although Horkeimer had wanted the Frankfurt School to undertake a comprehensive analysis ofSartre's philosophy, the only consideration of it that was anything more than superficial was Marcuse's 1948 article
"Existentialism: Remarks on Jean-Paul Sartre's L'etre et le Neant." (198)
For these reasons I feel that a close reading of Sartre's concepts of freedom as they apply to interpersonal relationships is long overdue.
Much has been written about the central character of Joe Christmas in Faulkner's Light in August.7 Not one of these critical works considers Sartre's scrutiny of this existential anti-hero, encased as it is in the dense Part Three of Being and Nothingness,
"Being-For-Others."8 In his preliminary discussion of sadism, Sartre states:
What the sadist thus so tenaciously seeks, what he wants to knead with his hands and bend under his wrists is the Other's freedom. The freedom is there in that flesh; it is the freedom which is this flesh since there is a facticity of the Other. It is therefore this freedom which the sadist tries to appropriate.
(Being and Nothingness 522)9
7 For a complete consideration of the criticism on Joe Christmas see William J.
Sowder's Existential-Phenomenological Readings on Faulkner. Conway, AR: UCA Press. 1991.
8 In Part Three we see the introduction of the basic concept of freedom as it concerns human relationships. This is further elucidated in Part Four of Sartre's Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1977.
9Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological
Ontology. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square, 1956. Hereafter cited in text as "BN."
Violence becomes the means by which the violator attempts to enslave the Other's freedom for himself and he seeks proof of this enslavement through humiliation and torture ofhis victim: ''this distorted and heaving body is the very image of a broken and enslaved freedom" (BN 524). However, this attempt to appropriate the victim's freedom is doomed to failure because his/her transcendent freedom is, on principle, out of reach.
Once the Other is treated as an object, his freedom is not transcendent but rather a dead thing. "The sadist discovers his error when his victim looks at him; that is when the sadist experiences the absolute alienation of his being in the Other's freedom" (BN 525). This reality is nowhere better portrayed, says Sartre, than in Faulkner's Light in August.
One important aspect of Sowder's criticism is that he writes of Joe Christmas as violator rather than victim. Indeed, as a rapist, a murderer and a murder victim, he is both in the novel. Sartre's analysis begins with the moment of Joe's death, for the
philosopher's interest is in the gaze, the look in which the violator comes to realize the failure of his attempt to appropriate his victim's freedom:
But the man on the floor had not moved. He just lay there, with his eyes open and empty of everything save consciousness, and with something, a shadow, about his mouth. For a long moment he looked up at them with peaceful and unfathomable and unbearable eyes. Then his face, body, all, seemed to collapse, to fall in upon itself and from out the slashed garments about his hips and loins the pent black blood seemed to rush like a released breath. It seemed to rush out of his pale body like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket; upon that black blast the man seemed to rise soaring into their memories forever and ever. They are not to lose it, in whatever peaceful valleys, beside whatever placid and reassuring streams of old age, in the mirroring face of whatever children they will contemplate old disasters and newer hopes. It will be there, musing, quiet, steadfast, not fading and not particularly threatful, but of itself alone serene, of itself alone triumphant.
Again from the town, deadened a little by the walls, the scream of the siren
mounted toward its unbelievable crescendo, passing out of the realm of hearing. (BN 526) 10
Looking into the Other's eyes that are "empty of everything save consciousness," the
men recognize the continued presence of the freedom which they sought to enslave. 11 The sadist fails in his goal on two levels. Once the Other is objectified, forced into the
immediacy of the flesh by pain, the transcendence is no longer present. As he/she
recovers this transcendence in the moment of death, the freedom is seen in the final gaze that is "of itself alone triumphant." In his victim's gaze the violator again becomes the objectified Other, moving from the "being-in-the-act-of-looking" to the "being-looked- at" (BN 527). It is likely this fear of being objectified by the Other's gaze that prompts certain serial killers to blind or blindfold their victims. Sartre explains this issue rather succinctly in these words: "Such is the origin of my concrete relations with the Other;
they are wholly governed by my attitudes with respect to the object which I am for the Other" (BN 473). In his final moments Christmas chooses his black heritage, "where life has already ceased before the heart stops and death is desire and fulfillment" (Light in August 496).12 He chooses his victim status as "crouched behind that overturned table
[he] let them shoot him to death, with that loaded and unfired pistol in his hand" (LIA 496).
10 The italics are Sartre's and the quotation is directly from Barnes' translation rather than from Light in August, since I wanted to be certain that I was looking through Sartre's own gaze, so to speak.
11 See also Jacques Derrida's The Gift of Death: "[T]his conscience that looks death in the face is another name for freedom" (15).
12 William Faulkner, Light in August. 1932. New York: Vintage, 1990. Hereafter cited in text as "LIA."
In his other aspect, Joe Christmas is also a violator. Sartre explains that both sadism and masochism are two sides of the same primitive, mistaken effort to relate to others:
Everything which may be said of me in my relations with the Other applies to him as well. While I attempt to free myself from the hold of the Other, the Other is trying to free himself from mine; while I seek to enslave the Other, the Other seeks to enslave me[ ... ]Conflict is the original meaning of being- for-others. (BN 475)
This resembles Hegel's famous and often quoted section in The Phenomenology of Spirit on the master/slave dialectic, the section Hegel calls "Lordship and Bondage."
This primitive state in which two beings with conflicting needs confront each othe1 to the death is often taken as evidence of Hegel's fascism. It is, though, only one
moment in Hegel's Phenomenology, a moment which must be overcome by a
developing consciousness: "[Man's] freedom is not to be found in any legendary state- of-nature, but evolves out of his effort to disassociate himself from his state of primal savagery" (Hegel 102). All efforts to assimilate the freedom of the Other are doomed to failure, yet they are the source of much violent behaviour of individual subjects.
Such failure, both for victim and violator, is revealed by Faulkner's text. Deeper analysis of the character of Joe Christmas offers a more complete picture of the dialectic.
Joe Christmas is a man who is on a search for his identity, an identity which can only be revealed in the act of being, that is to say through consciously chosen action. Sowder argues, rightly, that any analysis of his character must begin "with the uncontested fact that Christmas was incapable of forming a satisfactory relationship
with any other human being" (41). As a result of Joe's own fragmented sense of self, he seeks to wrest from others what the self feels it is lacking. He vacillates between identifying himself as white, with all that entails in his environment, and identifying himself as black, with its negative consequences. His sense ofhimselfis caught up in the object status given him by the Other. He is at one time called a "nigger bastard"
by white children, and named a "white bastard" by a Negro man. The only constant in this identity is the pejorative term, "bastard." Christmas rejects both ofthese designations thrust upon him by others, albeit in different ways and with very distinct social implications.
The reader does not know the reality of Joe's heritage, and this says John L.
Longley, is one of Faulkner's strokes of genius (166). It is not visible to the others he meets: "He dont look no more like a nigger than I do" says one of the deputies sent to track him down. The Negro yard boy tells him: "You'lllive and you'll die, and you wont never know" (qtd. in Longley 167). He needs to know though, or at least
"because he is free, he cannot let others tell him how or what to be" (Longley 167).
Having tried to live in both roles, Christmas is finally enraged by Joanna Burden's insistence that he embrace the black struggle to live as white men live. He will insist on his right to be free simply by virtue of his existence or being.
Joe begins his efforts towards self-empowerment in his relationships with women. As he approaches a Negro prostitute, after the other boys have done so, his rage explodes in violence towards the ''womanshenegro": "it seemed to him that he could see her--something prone, abject; her eyes perhaps" (LIA 172). Feeling, rather
than seeing her gaze, he must assert his own being the only way he feels able:
through violent submission of the Other. Santoni explains Sartre's position: "To be human ... any exploited native must be violent" (Santoni 50). On other occasions Joe seems to seek to surrender his own being to the Other, as a masochist does: "with something ofthe exaltation of his adopted father he sprang full and ofhis own accord into the stranger's fist[ ... ] he just lay there with a profoundly contemplative expression, looking quietly up at the two men, and the blonde woman still as
immobile and completely finished and surfaced as a cast statue" (LIA 240). This scene foreshadows Joe's passive acceptance of his own death, as he lies beneath the table with a gun that he refuses to shoot. The passive acceptance of pain also mirrors his relationship with his adopted father, and his stoic tolerance of the beatings
received from him. He expected nothing more, but was threatened by "the woman:
that soft kindness which he believed himself doomed to be forever victim of and which he hated more than he did the hard and ruthless justice of men" (LIA 185-6).
This soft feminine kindness he sees as a tool to take from him his own masculine identity, his only freedom: "She was trying to make me cry. Then she thinks that they would have had me" (Ibid).
Joanna Burden's kindness is perceived as a familiar threat and he needs to make her feel his masculine power. Raping her, he is angered by her masculine stoicism: "'My God,' he thought, 'it was like I was the woman and she was the man"' (LIA 258). When he returns to her house later, he is surprised to find the door is not locked:
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When he found that it was not locked it was like an insult. It was as though some enemy upon whom he had wreaked his utmost of violence and contumely stood, unscathed and unscarred, and contemplated him with a musing and insufferable contempt (261).
"In fact, his victim's passivity appears to fuel Joe's rage because he needs to terrify Joanna, a white woman, to feel power" (Bush 121). Although she resists, it is with what he considers to be masculine rules of combat (LIA 259). What he cannot tolerate is for others to discover the control that Joanna, a white woman, maintains between them: "He would have died or murdered rather than have anyone, another man, learn what their relations had now become" (271). As the sexual relationship gains in intensity, Christmas fears the loss of his identity: "He began to be afraid. He could not have said of what. But he began to see himself as from a distance, like a man being sucked down into a bottomless morass" (285). Sartre's analysis reveals love as a non-violent attempt to appropriate the freedom of the Other; subjects such as Joe Christmas, who have a weak sense of self, are threatened and overwhelmed by even this innocent feeling.
Once he has decided to kill Joanna he does so with recklessness that reveals little concern for getting caught. In Sowder's words: "In pride he will act or in shame be acted upon, but either way the initial action is rooted in fear, fear that if he does not attack, the other will, fear that if he does attack, he will lose" (53). What Christmas fears to lose, I assert, is the basic freedom that comes with existence as a human being. Without it, there can be no subjective sense of identity. He seeks it throughout his tragic life, but in such a racist environment he has few ways to assert
it. Finally, as in childhood, he finds that the only way to express this existential freedom is by confronting and consciously choosing the fate that seems to pursue him. He murders, frrst his adopted father and then Joanna Burden, in an attempt to liberate himself from their attempts to define him, to dictate his identity. He finds, though, that this does not work; the ghosts of his victims still haunt him and his sense of alienation is increased. He sets out to meet his fate, to choose it as his own. Like any modern existential hero, Joe Christmas accepts the responsibility for the choices he has made. Only this finaJ action, this final choice, gives him the freedom he has sought.
Sartre affirms that in certain circumstances the only freedom available is in the relinquishing of one's life. For the existentialist, one of the fundamental
characteristics ofthe authentic man, termed Dasein by German existential philosopher Heidegger, is his acceptance of the ownership of his death. In his Heideggerian study ofRichard Wright, The Death-Bound-Subject, Professor Abdul JanMohamed of the University of California argues ''that it is precisely the slave's ability to 'actualize' his potential death that permits him to find the exit that leads to his freedom" (15). The choice that Joe Christmas makes leads the other characters to reason that he must, in fact, be a Negro. According to Jean Weisgerber, "Christmas has only the preposterous freedom of choosing his own defeat, a particle of freedom bent by the environment towards evil and death".13 His crime is to attempt, through
13 Jean Weisgerber's text, Faulkner and Dostoevsky, is an interesting study of the influence ofthe Russian existentialist writer on the ideology of Faulkner. (See especially
